look I get it - ivies attract best and brightest and the incentive structure for businesses is such that things like this make sense (as a recruitment tool) but why not drop this kind of program on a good-not-ivy state school? there are so many to pick from (um Ann arbor, ut Austin, UF, stonybrook, CUNY, etc). it's just strikes me as very similar to wealthy donors donating back to ivies - like c'mon what is marginal…
Princeton has an extremely strong mathematics department (possibly the best in the world) plus the IAS is nearby. Perhaps they are looking for close collaboration with pure mathematicians? My understanding is that there are not very strong theoretical underpinnings to most of the machine learning techniques in use today.
I wonder how come this is the case from looking at ArXiv, it seems there are plenty of low-hanging fruit relating to the Foundations of Machine Learning.